Question agnosticism and change of state

Abstract

We give an account of the selectional behavior of cognitive change-of-state verbs, such as decide, that attempts to reduce this behavior to their change-of-state event structure. In particular, we argue that, if a cognitive verb is change-of-state, it is Q-agnostic—i.e. it selects both declarative and interrogative clauses. This augments previous accounts of Q-agnosticism, which have tied the distribution of declarative and interrogative clauses to semanticopragmatic notions like factivity and veridicality but which fail on nonveridical predicates like decide.